S2G Summit: Systems Investing in the Age of Adaptation

On the second day of the S2G Summit, Sanjeev Krishnan opened the morning with the organizing thesis, Systems Investing in the Age of Adaptation, arguing that five forces are reshaping the physical economy: intelligence, money, power, entropy, and aging. Together, he contended, these are the operating conditions of the current era, and their compounding interactions are reshaping the physical economy in ways that traditional asset-class frameworks were never built to navigate.

Where Day 1 explored the widening gap between where economic value is forming and where capital is flowing, Day 2 turned to the structural forces creating that gap. The morning examined each of these five forces, drawing on people navigating these trends in real time at the regulatory seat, in capital markets, across the geopolitical map, inside the insurance industry, and in the science of human aging, on the premise that understanding these forces together is the prerequisite for deploying capital matched to reality on the ground.

The Price of Intelligence: Power, Infrastructure, and the New Economics of Energy

Chairman Laura Swett of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission opened the day in conversation with Trent Morse, Founder of Morse Strategies and former Deputy Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. Swett framed the challenge plainly: the U.S. grid was not built to absorb the current pace of load growth, and getting new generation online faster is her top priority. She noted that, by statute, FERC is resource-agnostic across electrons and described dispatchable generation, including gas, as a meaningful part of the near-term answer, citing its role in keeping the country powered during Winter Storm Fern earlier this year.

According to Swett, the deeper constraint is the interconnection queue, where wait times across much of the country run five to ten years. FERC has been approving expedited queue programs in markets such as SPP, MISO, and PJM to address the backlog. Her broader message was that meeting this moment requires speed, flexibility, and rules clear enough to encourage private sector innovation and disciplined risk-taking alongside the regulated system. Her stated goal is to ​“make the rules clear and open the pathway for that innovation and risk-taking to happen.”

The Price of Money: Facts, Perception and the Cost of Capital at the Intersection of AI, Energy and Resilience

John Goldstein, Head of Sustainability at Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management, walked the room through what he called ​“the jungle,” the complicated landscape investors face now that the easy thematic trades of the last cycle no longer work. His core argument was that sustainability is no longer a carve-out. It sits at the intersection of three major capital cycles, AI, energy, and resilience, and is now central to the real economy.

He pushed back on headline-driven misconceptions. Energy transition capex is meaningfully larger than hyperscaler capex. Data centers are one driver of net new power demand, but industrial demand, electrification, and a growing global middle class each contribute as well, and recent forecasts project that a significant share of new U.S. power capacity will come from solar, batteries, and wind. His instruction to the room was, ​“Respond to data and reality, not to headlines.” For private markets, he offered a four-part compass: look for AI at a reasonable price, anchor every business in a strong customer value proposition, favor middle-of-the-river picks-and-shovels over exposed positions in the value chain, and pay attention to structural imbalances in the supply and demand of capital. He closed with a simple charge: ​“Know which game you’re playing, and know how to play it well.”

The Price of Power: Geopolitics, Supply Chains, and the New Map of Global Risk

Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor under President Obama, joined Shomik Dutta, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Overture VC, for a conversation about what the transition to a multipolar world actually looks like on the ground. His framing was that we are living through a twenty-year period of unraveling, with significant disruption still ahead before something new emerges. That something is most likely a renegotiated international order centered on technology, not U.S. hegemony, with blocs of countries working together across different issues.

He cautioned against underwriting the U.S. the way investors did last cycle. The US retains real advantages in its capital markets, defense, economy, and natural resources, but political dysfunction is structural now, not a function of any one administration. On the Gulf, he argued the Switzerland-of-capital model is under genuine strain following the Iran conflict, with the Emiratis doubling down on the U.S. and Israel while Saudi Arabia and Qatar hedge toward China. He expects the most likely outcome of the conflict to resemble a Suez moment, in which the U.S. declares victory while actual concessions on the nuclear program remain modest. His broader observation was that Americans no longer want to pay for the empire. According to Rhodes, ​“If you look at presidential elections since 2004, every single person that ran saying they were going to stop fighting dumb wars, stop burden sharing overseas, won.” He expects that pressure to keep reshaping the politics and resource allocation of U.S. foreign policy in ways the foreign policy establishment has not yet absorbed.

The Price of Power: Redefining Strategic Depth in a Fragmented World

Dr. Nadia Schadlow, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and principal author of the 2017 National Security Strategy, joined Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, builder, investor, and three-time New York Times bestselling author, to put a sharper frame on what investors should do with global disorder. Tzemach Lemmon opened by surfacing the three realignments Dr. Schadlow has been writing about: economic, political, and military, and the deeper clash between a decades-old global operating system and a state-centric one that is reasserting itself.

Dr. Schadlow’s advice was disciplined. Write down your actual assumptions about how the world works before building a strategy on top of them. Avoid consuming information from only one ideological corner. Expand your imagination about what can actually happen, because old mental models no longer hold. She introduced strategic depth as a proactive concept distinct from resilience, and as something China has been patiently building for decades through Belt and Road, maritime infrastructure, and its presence in U.S. critical infrastructure. Her practical rule for evaluating U.S. industrial policy was simple: ​“Always follow the wallet. Words are actually free.” Executive orders set direction, but money and the organizations that hold it drive implementation.

The New Map: Coordinates of Opportunity

Dr. Parag Khanna, Founder and CEO of AlphaGeo, closed the geopolitics block by literally drawing the map. Across five visualizations refined over fifteen years, he walked the room through what the new geography of trade and energy actually looks like.

North America, he argued, is closer to self-sufficiency and strategic autonomy than any other region in the world, with the U.S. now trading more with Canada and Mexico than either country trades with China. In the Middle East, alternative pipelines and railways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz were planned decades ago and never built. According to Khanna, ​“You don’t appreciate infrastructure until the bottleneck hits your economy.” He pointed to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor and the Middle Corridor through the Caspian and Black Seas as gaining importance as the world seeks alternatives to choke points, and sketched a future Pax Arabia where new linkages across the region could yield a more rational map. His closing line was the one the room carried into the break. ​“The only way you get to systemic resilience is by building more infrastructure and connectivity.” Disruption is not only a cost. It is also a map of opportunities.

The Price of Entropy: What Insurance Knows That Markets Don’t

Dawn Miller, Chief Commercial Officer and CEO of Lloyd’s Americas, joined Sanjeev for a conversation about how risk is actually priced when underlying conditions are changing this quickly. Lloyd’s has been pricing risk for more than 300 years, operating as a marketplace whose collective job, as she put it, is to create conditions for the right risk takers to take on complexity and unknown risk.

She drew a useful distinction between predicting risk, the longer-arc work of looking forward, and modeling risk, the shorter-arc work of pricing capital today. On the Strait of Hormuz, she pushed back on headlines suggesting the insurance market has closed it. Marine war coverage remains available and is repriced dynamically as conditions evolve. The real constraint sits on the demand side, where ship owners and captains are weighing the safety of their assets and crews. Her broader theme was that capital follows regulatory clarity. She pointed to Florida as a recent success story, where collaboration between the state insurance commissioner and the private market has moved a meaningful share of policies out of the state pool and back into private hands. Where the regulatory environment is unclear or inconsistent, capital steps back, not because appetite is lacking, but because the conditions for deploying it are not in place. As Miller put it, ​“Capital has choices where it puts its money.”

The Price of Aging: Frailty, Healthspan, and the Economy of Longevity

Dr. Jeffrey Bland, widely considered the founder of functional medicine and founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine, the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, and S2G portfolio company Big Bold Health, closed the morning with a quieter conversation that may have been the most personally relevant for the room. His argument was that aging is not the real problem. Frailty is. As more than two billion people move into the over-60 cohort in the coming decade, the question is not how long they live but how well they live, and what that means for capital.

He pointed to quality-adjusted and disability-adjusted life years as more meaningful measures than lifespan alone, and to the growing body of research on immune resilience and nutritional epigenetics, the science of how food may influence gene expression and how the immune system ages over time. According to Bland, ​“Long lives with frailty is not the answer. What we’re really talking about is long lives with vitality.” The macroeconomic thread ran throughout. Frailty carries real costs across healthcare, housing, workforce productivity, insurance, and infrastructure. His framing left the room with a clear sense of why the science of healthspan matters to anyone allocating capital across long horizons.

Building into the Moment

Day 2 sharpened the thesis introduced on Day 1. The five forces shaping the next era are not abstract. They are showing up in interconnection queues, in the pricing of marine war coverage, in the realignment of Gulf state capital, in the maps of new trade corridors, in the regulatory choices of state insurance commissioners, and in the data of aging. Together, through their compounding interactions, they define the conditions under which the next 30 years of returns will be generated.

What stayed with us across the morning was a shared discipline. Respond to data and reality, not to headlines. Cultivate connectivity, not just resilience. Follow the wallet. And build what the moment actually demands, rather than what the last cycle rewarded.

This is what systems investing in the age of adaptation looks like. We are grateful to every speaker, partner, and attendee who brought their thinking, candor, and care into the room. The conversations from this week will keep shaping the work, and we look forward to continuing them with each of you.

Photo credits: Dietz Studio